Category Archives: Politics

Brexit: Is Britain the new Pakistan

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Shared by Nasik Elahi
An article in Huffington Post

Is this title a fair reflection.  It is a headline grab but the points it makes are
important.  The future has to look more peaceful than our present or past. 
Otherwise we remain on the same treadmill of needless and endless violence.  The EU
was the first step in breaking down the past. With Brexit the promise remains
unfulfilled.  The world remains like Pakistan, perpetually on the edge.

Nasik Elahi

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/10749766.html?yptr=yahoo

“Be Careful What You Wish For” Brief Thought By F. Sheikh

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BREXIT has sent a shock wave throughout the world. Many in Britain who voted for exit did not expect or thoroughly thought about the economic chaos and collateral damage it will bring. Many voted just as a protest vote for exit but did not expect that it will pass. 57 % of the older generation, who are longing for old days, voted for the exit, whereas 57% of the younger generation voted against the exit. One young heartbroken tweeted;

“Truly gutted that our grandparents have effectively decided that they hate foreigners more than they love us and our futures,” one young Briton, Dan Boden, wrote on Twitter

But will this revolt against Globalization and inequality bring back old jobs with security, good pay and benefits may it be Britain, USA or any other country? So far leaders who are exploiting this public outrage are only capitalizing on public anger but has not offered any solution to the problem and may make the problem even worse without any thoughtful solution in place.

Globalization and technological advances are part of natural evolution and are here to stay. Immigrant labor, like capital, flows to the region where it is treated best and is part of Globalization. The challenge is for governments, capitalists markets and labor is to collaborate and provide solutions to adjust to this new phenomenon for smooth transition. Exploitation to go back in time will create more dislocations and is not the solution. So far we mostly see only exploitation and little solution.

IMF & WB vis-a-vis the underdeveloped countries.

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Imtiaz Bokhari Sahib has written to me again that he wants to continue discussion about the topic in the title. Some of the initial exchanges between some members were done via email but most TF subscribers should have received those exchanges. So Bokhari Sahib, this is in some more detail the point I have been making.

Some of you have seen recent discussion going on the TF mailing list re. the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank vis a vis Third World countries. The original article’s premise was that the above two institutions were essentially blood suckers making poor countries poorer while those poor countries were faultless victims. I did not challenge the premise that those institutions (IMF &WB and their investors) care only for their profit and not for the well being of the citizens of those poor countries. The only thing I challenged is the fact that the underdeveloped countries were made out to be faultless victims.
As a result I was asked by some to read some articles that would enlighten me. At the time I refused to read those articles because I didn’t think you could acquire commonsense by reading an article and I feel commonsense is all you need to come to the conclusion I came to. Fayyaz,Nasik and Babar Sahibs actually did – and put it in writing. But over the long weekend I had a few hours to kill and to satisfy my own curiosity I decided to do my own research on the subject. I have attached links to a few articles and to be objective I have purposely chosen articles that are highly critical of the IMF and the WB but read carefully and you’ll see that those countries were not faultless. I’ll make it easier by giving you the exact location of the lines that will prove my point.
As you can see this article is highly critical of IMF & WB but scroll down to section “How do countries get into financial trouble, the Debt Crisis” and read the third line down in the second paragraph. Corrupt and inept leaders is why the countries are poor in the first place; getting loans to fill their own pockets makes things worse. And what is a bank supposed to do when a country fails to pay back? you certainly don’t expect them to say “please consider that loan as charity, we have enough money”.
This article is even more critical of IMF & WB but go to paragraph nine and read some of the lines.
Both these authors  seem to write pages and pages about how evil the banks are (and I am not even denying that) but  very casually glide over the ineptness of the poor countries’ leaders as if it was a very, very minor cause of poor countries getting poorer. I  think the leaders of those countries are AT LEAST half the problem
Shoeb

Democracies end when they are too democratic. by Andrew Sullivan

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Have we become too democratic? Has democracy run its course in this country? Are we about to enter an era of tyranny replacing democracy? Apparently many thinkers, including Plato, have suggested that democracy is not everlasting and usually ends in tyranny. In the era of Trump it seems some of those predictions seem clairvoyant, according to the author. I am copying this article from a recent New York Magazine.

Shoeb

As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

Click below for the rest of the article

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html